Tag Archives: twitter

The number of people on Twitter fell during the three months ending in June as it worked to clean up the platform and comply with new privacy regulations.

The social network said Friday that it had 335 million monthly users around the world in the second quarter, down from 336 million users in the quarter prior. The number of users could also decline in the third quarter, Twitter warned.

The company attributed the dip in part to “decisions we have made to prioritize the health of the platform” and, to a lesser extent, complying with sweeping new data protection regulations in Europe.

The stock fell 15% in premarket trading Friday after the earnings results.

You can learn a lot about a public company by reading its risk factors.

These are the portions of companies’ financial filings that require them to put on a show of honesty and humility. Risk factors are the challenges a company sees for itself, the threats it believes could sink it.

Twitter lists more than 40 risk factors in its most recent quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Many of them are obvious challenges that apply to any company (currency fluctuations could hurt, taxes might go up, God forbid a natural disaster destroy our headquarters, etc.). So far, it has navigated those successfully enough. It’s on the risk factors unique to Twitter it has foundered.

Here are a dozen areas where Twitter has foreseen risks — but still failed to avoid them.

Twitter may have re-oriented itself and laid off part of its workforce to streamline its business, but it still doesn’t look like it is bringing in enough money to keep Wall Street happy.

Here is the biggest data point from the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report: according to the company, advertising revenue totaled $638 million, which was down slightly year-over-year. A reversal in its advertising growth is certainly not going to help Twitter’s case, which needs to be able to pitch itself to advertisers as a legitimate alternative to Facebook — and now Snap, which is expected to go public in March and already generated $400 million in 2016.

The iPad was a futuristic gadget when it debuted in April 2010, but the apps it presented offered a rather nostalgic revival of traditional media. Photos, graphics, magazines, and books optimized for its high-res screen featured a print-era visual polish that had been sorely missing from ad-crammed web pages and monochrome ebook readers.

One of the early hits was Flipboard, a graphical embodiment of social media that launched in July 2010. It turned Twitter and Facebook feeds into an online magazine by displaying the photos, articles, or other pages that people linked to. Previews of articles were laid out like items on a newspaper page; and flicking up on the screen triggered a visual effect that looked like flipping pages. Flipboard was among the top 10 iPad apps in its early days, according to rankings by AppAnnie. “It seemed to be a perfectly timed creature of the iPad age, of the tablet age,” says digital advertising consultant Ken Doctor, author of the book Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.

As first announced back in October, Twitter is about to shut down its looping video app and social network, Vine. The company had originally implied it would pull the Vine app from the app stores, but later said it would transition it to a new, low-maintenance app called Vine Camera instead. Ahead of this, Vine’s website and app were updated to allow you to export your Vines for posterity, if you couldn’t bear to lose them.

Vines can be exported until some point today from the vine.co website, or from the iOS or Android application. The Vine website currently says you can download your Vines “only until January 17, when the apps become the Vine Camera,” but the mobile app’s banner says the app will actually be updated tomorrow.

In any event, you have only hours left to grab your Vines before they’re gone.

With more content and competition in the world today, it’s easy for anyone to get started with a social media account, website, or blog of their own. However, if you really want to build a following and show off your expertise, it’s going to take a special set of skills, dedication, and passion to stand out from the crowd.

Not all niche markets are created the same. Some have much smaller audiences, which makes it much easier to become an authority within that space; others, like “business and marketing,” are much more competitive, and also more lucrative.

We are going to take a look at some of today’s top online marketers and how they have built up the massive and loyal followings they have today. Not only are each of these marketers active on social media, they also have great online content and blogs.

A few days before Twitter’s Sept. 8 board meeting, as the company’s finance team readied a presentation, it received conflicting directions on a crucial question. Should their slides reflect Twitter’s prospects as an independent company or delve into the benefits of getting acquired?

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive officer, argued that the 10-year-old company should remain on its current course and work to capitalize on recent product improvements and success in streaming live video, people familiar with the discussions said. Ev Williams, a former CEO who has a history of clashing with Dorsey, was in favor of exploring a sale. Other directors agreed they had a fiduciary duty to consider that option. The board ultimately decided to consider takeover prospects after getting an expression of interest from a potential acquirer, which led it to hire Goldman Sachs and Allen & Co. to evaluate possible bids.

Twitter is offering some of its most influential users a cut of the money it makes off of their posts in a push to populate the platform with more in-house video.

Starting Tuesday, publishers and other high-profile accounts will be able to mark a box on each video tweet they send indicating that they’d like to tack on a pre-roll promotion, the social network announced. Twitter will then share with them a portion of the revenue it collects on those ads.

The deal will give users the lion’s share of the revenue — 70 percent — while Twitter takes 30 percent for itself, a person familiar with the arrangement said.

ANOTHER WEEK, ANOTHER eruption of abuse on Twitter. This time, it was Breitbart writer and self-anointed “supervillain of the Internet” Milo Yiannopoulos, whom the company finally banned after he stoked his followers into flooding Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones with hateful and racist messages. Yiannopoulos went so far as to tweet out fake screenshots of things Jones supposedly but did not actually say on Twitter. In the end, Jones said she would leave Twitter altogether.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was apparently aware of the situation, tweeting at Jones as early as Monday evening. But Twitter still took another day to finally kick Yiannopolous off the platform after facing considerable public pressure. On Thursday afternoon, Jones posted a short tweet saying she was grateful for the public’s support. “People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter,” Twitter said in a statement addressing the incident. “But no one deserves to be subjected to targeted abuse online, and our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others.”